Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nelma Kodama: The Queen Of Dirty Money’ On Netflix, A Documentary About A Brazilian “Dollar Dealer” And Her Blinged Out Ankle Monitor

Nelma Kodama: The Queen of Dirty Money, now streaming on Netflix, is the true crime tale of an unapologetic criminal. In the 2000s, Nelma Mitsue Penasso Kodama became one of Brazil’s most prominent “dollar dealers,” a go-between for people looking to exchange dirty money for the clean kind. But when she was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted as part of a huge federal corruption probe, Kodama leaned into the publicity, and her eventual house arrest. In sit-down interviews, Kodama tells her own story, and Queen of Dirty Money also speaks with her co-conspirators, politicians caught up in the corruption, and the journalists who covered the story. She was convicted of money laundering, and is accused of drug trafficking. But Kodama remains weirdly defiant. “Nothing wrong with that,” she maintains. “I mean, there was. Because it was illegal…” 

NELMA KODAMA – THE QUEEN OF DIRTY MONEY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “My high point wasn’t getting to the end, where no woman had ever gotten. It was getting there with style.” Walking with Nelma Kodama through her light-filled, high-rise apartment in São Paulo, with all of its expensive touches – “I bought all my furniture in Italy” – you might assume she was simply a successful businesswoman. And in a way, that’s true. But then you notice the hard-plastic, LED-blinking piece of flair that complements her elegant, pricey-looking heels. The ankle monitoring device is a condition of her house arrest for breaking the law. But Kodama wonders: what is breaking the law? If her work as a dollar dealer existed as part of a network of criminality that included corporations, politicians, and a constant flow of international currency there for the taking, then Kodama seems to have decided that she was just another person looking for her piece.

In The Queen of Dirty Money, we first learn how the dollar dealing worked. The scheme grew from local in São Paulo, to regional in Paraguay, to an international level, with so many wire transfers between Brazil and the US and China that Kodama’s operation relied on hundreds of cell phones to manage it. (If you’ve ever seen the 2006 film version of Miami Vice, the same financially porous region key to Kodama’s currency deals, the “triple frontier” where Brazil and Paraguay meet Argentina, figured heavily into the plot.) Things were going great, and Kodama left behind her intentions to become a dentist in favor of a blinged-out lifestyle full of Chanel perfume, exclusive boutiques, and spontaneous first-class trips to Paris. But when her professional and personal link to a high-profile money launderer named Alberto Youssef were exposed, Kodama was caught up in a federal dragnet that became known as Operation Car Wash.          

Blurry reenactments tell part of the story here. But it’s the interviews with Nelma Kodama herself that dominate the proceedings, whether she’s sitting with her pooch in her sleek apartment or stewing in lockup on drug trafficking charges. That’s right, when she was already facing charges as part of Car Wash, Kodama was also arrested in Portugal on suspicion of importing cocaine into South America. “She needs to be in charge,” a former conspirator says of how Kodama is wired. “She couldn’t get back into business, so she decided to enter the drug world,” adds a Brazilian politician incriminated in Car Wash. But to hear Kodama tell it, she was only ever doing what was allowed. Not legal, but allowed. Because governmental and financial interests much larger than just one woman do it every goddamn day.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The financial system schemers profiled in the Netflix true crime doc Lords of Scam were all about brazenly living that high life, too, until it came back to bite them. And if you caught Griselda on Netflix, there are a ton of similarities between Sofia Vergara’s Colombia and then Miami-based drug queenpin and Nelma Kodama, a comparison made only stronger by the reenactments in Queen of Dirty Money, which are shot like a TV drama. 

Performance Worth Watching: The case of Manuela Nunes Ferreira is an interesting one. While the Coimbra, Portugal-based lawyer is representing Nelma Kodama in the drug trafficking case brought against her in that country, Ferreira’s interviews are less about the ongoing litigation and more about how the two women have bonded on a personal level. “We are really alike in many ways, starting with our poor taste in men. We laugh. A lot. In fact, once we laughed about precisely that.”   

Memorable Dialogue: “At the fringes of politics,” Brazilian journalist Manu Gaspar says, “there is a whole ecosystem to keep dirty money flowing. Because of corruption, the need to pay bribes, distribute illegal advantages, black-market dollar dealers” – such as Kodama – “and financial operators work to circulate this money in this underworld, under the law’s radar.”  

Sex and Skin: Portions of the reenactments in Queen of Dirty Money are a little bit saucy, like when Kodama would meet Youssef for hotel dalliances that combined business with pleasure. But the bubble baths are blurry and the hanky-panky is only suggested.

Our Take: The timeline in Nelma Kodama: The Queen of Dirty Money is under-defined, and that can make it difficult to follow the trajectory of its subject’s criminal activities. One minute, she is garrulous in her gleaming São Paulo apartment, regaling the camera with stories of taking selfies with fans who adore her ankle monitor. The next, she’s in prison orange and laughing about how she corrects her fellow inmates when they refer to her as “dollar stealer” instead of dollar dealer. Both the Kodama story and the larger corruption scandal she was a part of were big news in Brazil. It involved a giant state-owned company, Petrobras, there were prominent politicians caught up in it, and federal judges making bold plays for splashy convictions, which eventually led to the entire case faltering at the finish line. But that narrative quickly becomes murky in Queen of Dirty Money, which doesn’t define the various players well enough, or relies too heavily on brief bits of news reporting for exposition. There is another true crime documentary lurking in the margins of this one that would certainly be relevant. But as it is, Queen only tells some of that story, and instead allows Kodama to hold court. She is an interesting figure in that, and a total quote machine. But we wish we could have better understood the scope of her criminal behavior as it applies to the larger context of endemic financial corruption on an international scale. 

Our Call: Nelma Kodama: The Queen of Dirty Money is a STREAM IT, because the dollar dealer at the heart of it really is eminently quotable, and kind of relatable as a woman making moves inside male-dominated networks that didn’t respect her acumen. But you might also need to conduct a little background research of your own if you want to truly follow its convoluted narrative. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.